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A Professional Web hosting provider should provide Reliable Services and Servers to Customers. Nowadays, In the Web Hosting Industry, you will find many Web hosting providers who Claim to provide Unlimited Disk space and Bandwidth which is certainly not possible and these Kind of hosting providers are not Professional Hosting providers and hence Users shouldn't trust these kind of hosting providers.

Another important thing when it comes to a Professional hosting provider is the kind of support the company provides. A professional hosting provider should provide 24x7 support to customers through several means of communication so that the users are able to contact the hosting provider in case of any problems. Knowledgeable and Friendly staff who are always ready to assist customers is also important.

Top of the top servers (hardware) and bandwidth is the least a professional host should render. Another important thing that I vote for is, 24 x 7 support by chat (for international customers) and 24 x 7 support by phone (the most preferred by local customers).

There are multiple points to be considered. And may be I am repeating what others already said, IMO they are,
1. A quality hardware and network
2. Reasonable price with reasonable resources
3. Real 24/7 support with knowledgeable and friendly techs.
4. Flexibility to upgrade the plans if customer needs
5. Be truthful towards the customers regarding your policies

* Try not to oversell your services, packing tonnes of people onto servers can be fraustrating when you suffer downtime.
* Always be prepared for issues and downtime that may occur, give your clients notice and if downtime is extended, compensate them appropriately.
* Keep your software up to date (latest versions of LAMP etc)
* Give them a decent control panel with functionality and upgrade options.
* Be competitively priced but do not state "unlimited" anything.
* Finally... Listen to feedback! Give the users what they want and talk about improvements to your services in a blog so that people are aware of your latest developments. Your customers are what is important and you should make sure to keep providing new functionality based on your users needs.

A professional web hosting provider must guarantee you a high level of uptime along with 24/7 technical support.

As a user, it’s better to choose those web hosting companies that provide 24/7 online technical support as it's more convenient. Of course one of the key factors is how quickly they respond to your request.

Of course one of the key factors is how quickly they respond to your request.

For me, most of the time it is key how good their response is, rather than the time it takes to receive it. If the server is down, I expect them to be working on it way before I manage to contact them.